Co-founded
by Frank Zappa
and his then-manager Herbie Cohen, the sister labels Bizarre and
Straight are most known for issuing (on Bizarre) several Mothers of
Invention and Zappa solo albums in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
During that same period, Bizarre and Straight also issued a handful of
LPs by numerous other artists, the most famous of them being Captain
Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica
and Alice Cooper's first three albums. It's less well known that
Straight in particular served as an outlet for several other
interesting, somewhat less celebrated cultish acts, including Tim
Buckley, vocal group the Persuasions, and notorious Los Angeles
groupies the GTO's.
Even lesser known is Tim Dawe's 1969 Straight LP Penrod, which perhaps holds the
distinction of the most obscure release ever to appear on the label. If
there was only one thing predictable about a Straight release, it's
that contrary to what the label name might lead the unsuspecting to
expect, it would never be a
"straight" or conventional rock record. Such was the case with Penrod, which boasted an enigmatic
mixture of psychedelia, early singer-songwriter moves, almost crooning
troubadour folk, baroque classical influences, and inventively florid
arrangements and orchestration. Such is the rarity of original copies
today that it seems unlikely it sold much upon its first appearance, or
that the musicians who recorded it stayed together much longer after
its release.

Many releases on the Straight label had a direct
connection to Frank Zappa and/or Herbie Cohen, whether the artists
(such as Buckley) were also managed by Cohen, or whether the musicians
had at times played with Zappa (like Captain Beefheart and one-time
Mothers of Invention bassist Jeff Simmons). It was a similar deal with Penrod, which was produced by Jerry
Yester, who'd issued a late-'60s psychedelic cult classic on Straight
with then-wife Judy Henske, Farewell
Aldebaran. Yester and Henske were also managed by Cohen, and
Yester had also produced or co-produced two late-'60s albums for fellow
Cohen client Tim Buckley, Goodbye
and Hello and Happy Sad.
When Cohen was considering having Tim Dawe cut an album, he sought out
Yester's input.

Tim Dawe, believes Yester, was probably first seen
by Cohen at a hootenanny night at the famed Los Angeles club the
Troubadour, as "that's where Herbie found a lot of his artists. I think
he first saw [Tom] Waits [whose first album Yester would produce]
there, for example. Herbie called me and said, 'Listen man, I saw this
group at the hoot. I want you to go down to San Diego and listen to
them, and see if we need to make a record of them.' As soon as he said
that, I decided that he needed to make a record of it, because I was
out of work at the time," he laughs. "They would have had to have been
pretty bad for me to say 'No go.' Judy and I went down [to San Diego to
see Dawe], we were still together then. As it turns out, they were very
good. So it was with some relief" that Jerry took the job of producing
the album.

To clear up some confusion, though it's sometimes
been reported that Dawe had previously been in Iron Butterfly and
Rhinoceros, that appears not to be the case. There was a Jerry Penrod
who played bass in those groups, and the assumption seems to have
arisen from the mysterious Penrod
title of Dawe's LP. Penrod, says Yester, was actually the name of the
group Dawe fronted as singer-songwriter (as well as playing acoustic
guitar).

Indeed, the actual LP sleeve seems indecisive as to
whether the name of the artist is Penrod or Tim Dawe, putting the name
Penrod in large all-caps lettering on top, and printing the name (and a
tiny picture) of Dawe in much smaller type in the lower left-hand
corner. The four other musicians were not session guys using
pseudonyms, as has sometimes been speculated by collectors, but Dawe's
actual band, including keyboardist Arnie Goodman, drummer Claude
Mathis, electric guitarist Chris Kebeck, and bassist Don Parrish.
Goodman, says Yester, is brother of violinist Jerry Goodman, famous for
playing in the late-'60s Chicago rock group the Flock, and later as a
member of the Mahavishnu Orchestra with guitarist John McLaughlin.

When he heard Dawe and his band, remembers Yester,
"I said, 'This is going to be a piece of cake.' I don't know how long
they'd been together, but they were pretty tight. They had their parts
down. They'd rehearsed the stuff a lot, and it was like record-ready. I
remember taping them on a really early cassette machine in a place
where they rehearsed, and listening to it, it just seemed like it was
taken off a record. So it seemed like not a lot of work to do."

In the studio, Jerry continues, "it took a very
short time to do. Maybe a couple of weeks, and we were finished with
everything—mixing and mastering and everything. There might have been a
couple of things where I suggested something here and there, but they
were pretty together. Getting their sound was just no problem, because
they were so well-rehearsed. We just set up the mikes and bingo, it was
like one- or two-take kind of stuff. The guitar player was really good
and really proficient—none of the problems usually associated with
guitar players!" he laughs.

Dawes himself, Yester adds, was "a really nice
fellow and easy to get along with. He seemed unlikely as a rock'n'roll
singer. His approach was just way different than anybody else. He had a
real kind of formal-sounding voice, is the only way I can put it."
Though Dawes's vocal style has sometimes been compared (by the
relatively few people who've heard and written about Penrod) to Tim Buckley, perhaps
because of the Yester/Straight association, to Jerry "it never struck
me that way at all. Tim [Buckley] was real moody and a lot more
bohemian. Tim [Dawes] just seemed crisp and such an upstanding guy. I'm
not saying that [Buckley] wasn't. But [Buckley] really had no regard at
all for convention. And [Dawes] could have been a scoutmaster."

Like the Straight album Yester had recently done
with Judy Henske (Farewell Aldebaran),
Penrod was in some respects so
eclectic as to defy classification. Parts were reminiscent of earnest
mid-to-late-1960s folk-rock singer-songwriters like Eric Andersen, Phil
Ochs, and Tim Hardin, yet with edgier, harder-rocking
psychedelic-influenced backing. "Sometimes Alone" and "Didn't We Love"
climaxed with psychedelic distorted dissonance, yet "Some Other Time"
featured gorgeous classical-influenced keyboards by Goodman. And as he
had on Goodbye and Hello,
Yester added some orchestration to the folk-rock-psychedelic core.
"That was still pretty early in my orchestration career, and I liked to
do it every time I could," he notes. "I didn't force it on people,
certainly, but if I thought it could use it, I suggested it."

Perhaps the standout cut on the record is the
seven-and-a-half-minute "Junkie John," a brooding downbeat tale set
against haunting funereal organ, wailing backup vocals, and a languid
yet mordant jazzy groove. "The best line in that [is] in the spoken
intro that he does—'when he walked into a room, you got the feeling
that somebody just left'," feels Yester. "I've used that over the
years, 'cause I've known people like that. I knew what he meant. That
was a pretty good line."

The Penrod
album went virtually unnoticed, however, and Dawes and the musicians
would never issue another album together. With the exception of one
occasion on which Arnie Goodman got Yester a job teaching a two-week
intensive course at Chicago's Columbia College around a couple years or
so later, in fact, Jerry would never see any of them again. "I have a
feeling they didn't really perform very much," Yester concludes. "I
think if they did, they would have developed a following, because they
had a really interesting collection of tunes. It seems they would have
been appealing. It was just an odd kind of a thing. It came and went in
my life in less than a month." -- Richie Unterberger